Tropo is excited to partner with Apigee on the Tropo API Explorer! The API Explorer allows more developers to explore, learn, and test Tropo’s cloud communications APIs faster than ever before.

Tropo provides an API and cloud communications platform for building powerful Voice applications with speech recognition and text-to-speech in 24 languages, call recording, conferencing, SIP/VoIP, and phone numbers in 41 countries. Tropo also provides international SMS services.

The API Explorer makes this integration easier, helping developers authenticate and test our API in seconds, view the full surface area of an API, view request/response pairs in only a few clicks and share what they are seeing with others.

Now you can use the Apigee API explorer to experiment with our REST API without writing a single line of code! It is built with Apigee To-Go, a free product to let users build, skin and embed their own API Console. The Tropo API Explorer is embedded below or you can jump to this full screen version.

©2012 The Tropo Blog. All Rights Reserved.

No related posts.

Bookmark this post:

We have a conundrum on our hands. With the rise of social media, anyone with an Internet connection can spread their views all over the globe. Which poses a problem, for free-speech nations as well as suppressed-speech nations.

Today, Twitter announced that it will censor tweets if governments ask for it. It’s kind of a bandaid approach to a much bigger issue, which is that social media has opened up the whole world. Can we control it? Should we?

Twitter’s removal of tweets upon request by governments is targeted towards free-speech nations, not oppressive ones. It’s intended for nations like France and Germany, who are constantly working to suppress anti-Semitic or pro-Nazi sentiment.

Twitter doesn’t operate in suppressive nations because of the fundamental incompatibility inherent there. It just doesn’t work. By its very nature, Twitter requires freedom of speech.

“We hold freedom of expression in high esteem and work hard not to remove tweets,” Twitter spokeswoman Jodi Olson told CNN. “And just to be clear, this is not a change in philosophy, and there are still countries to which we will not go.”

According to the Vancouver Sun, Twitter can’t get into China, for example. China’s censorship starts with what’s referred to as the “Great Firewall of China.” Global Internet service enters through eight government-filtered gateways. Filters include long lists of websites and keywords that Chinese Internet users can’t access—they receive a “page cannot be found” error message.

That’s one way to do it. Another way is the Bavarian approach to Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler’s manifesto from 1923. Basically, the Bavarian state government, which owns the rights to the work until 2015, has blocked publication of the controversial work over the years. There’s actually no German law on the books blocking it, Bavaria has just refused to allow it.

Wednesday, a German court blocked publication of excerpts from Mein Kampf in a British academic work, according to CNN. It’s effectively only a three-year ban because the rights expire in 2015, but it’s a statement nonetheless. I mean, anyone can read Mein Kampf on the Internet (in most countries, of course).

But it’s not like censorship is new. Even free governments have influenced or controlled the media at various points in history, particularly during wartime.

A May 10, 1945, article in The Miami News ran a story about a wartime correspondent up in arms about censorship of his Reims surrender story, for example. Correspondent Edward Kennedy called it “purely political censorship,” saying that military security wasn’t an issue.

In 2011, we saw the power of social media in the Arab Spring. It became a primary weapon for revolution. It’s an issue that’s starting to come up more and more.

Every government asks Twitter or Facebook to censor something from time to time. Those companies actually keep records of the requests, which anyone can look up on the Internet (again, in most countries).

I guess the question is: Is it right to censor views, even if those views are abhorrent to most of us? I don’t know. But I think we’re just beginning to see this emerge as an issue, and it’ll grow in importance as social media continues its rise.

Bookmark this post:

Here at Plum, the very nature of our business is dependent on being informed of the latest, greatest, most cutting-edge technology.  Our IVR technology can perform myriad functions, and we can build and construct almost any type of technology our customers request.  The almost is the caveat, and some technology simply hasn’t been created or perfected yet, so we all wait with breath that is bated to hear about the milestone tech developments that can enhance our products and services.

While there is certainly room for debate, one of the de facto industry tech innovators has always been Apple, and there is always a huge amount of excitement from Plum and in the world out large when rumors of a new product hit the Internet.  There is very good reason for this.

The iPhone 4s basically blew the lid off of speech technology with Siri.  Siri is one of the most exciting developments for those in the IVR and speech technology industries to date, owing to the fact that Siri has an impressively advanced vocabulary and comprehension ability.

That is why today’s news, that the iPhone 5 might be scheduled for a release sometime this summer, comes as one of the most exciting bits of tech speculation we have received thus far this year.

Per an article published on Mashable, the iPhone 5 is rumored to have a 4-inch screen that would finally put it in the same league as Android and other smart phones.  A tipster postulates that the new iPhone is gearing up for production and will potentially be available for widespread purchase as early as this summer.

For everyone rolling their eyes out there, saying to themselves there are always murmurs of the release of the next Apple product, your skepticism is not unfounded.  However, 9to5 Mac, the publication that originally published the story, is a far more credible source than the publications that typically publish the rumors.

Additionally, there has been speculation that several different samples that all have slight variations will be produced.  For all previous releases, Apple has commissioned the development of several prototypes before deciding on the final production model.

Typical iPhone rumors offer very specific, often fairly ridiculous details regarding potential features and production plans (think three times the storage capacity of current iPhones, ability to unlock and start car, home, et cetera, the ability to fly).  However, the vagueness of the rumor is reassuring.  Per Mashable: “After all, if you were just going to make something up, why not be more detailed? There’s certainly no shortage of potential features to choose from.”

A critical mass of the tech community is waiting with breath that is bated to find out when the phone will be released, and what the improvements will be, and here at Plum, we are no exception.  Have no doubt, we will keep you posted.

Bookmark this post:

My friend Sonya turned 30 this past weekend and I wanted to whip up something heartfelt and crafty to herald the glorious conclusion of her twenties.  Given that my competency with glue guns and popsicle sticks is lower than Lee Evans’ current self-esteem, I was left with two options:

1. Buy something on Etsy and pass it off as my own.
2. Cut some code.

Since Sonya possesses one of the most finely-tuned baloney filters in New York, I felt the latter was the safest choice.  But what to write given my busy schedule as friendly neighborhood developer evangelist and worse predilection for fanciful side projects than Ben Gibbard?

Her husband Alex and I rapped for a few minutes on what we could code quickly and came up with the terrifically telephonic “Reasons Sonya Is Awesome Hotline” – a number the birthday gal could SMS anytime and receive a random reason why she is awesome.  In a couple dozen minutes of hacking and testing we would have a handcrafted heartwarmer that she could keep and use regardless of any new phone she chooses to by in the future.  While he set hurriedly to collect reasons from her friends and family, I opened a terminal and started going to town.

Cloud-based Tools for Quick Craftwork

Speed was key, so I needed to rock this Twilio app with a quickness.  Flask is my usual go-to for speedy development the Python web microframework sports a Werkzeug foundation leaving plenty of easy hosting options, simple RESTful request dispatching, and a built-in development server for easy debugging.

The framework choice needed to be paired with a no-muss-no-fuss hosting option.  Zero configuration with uberfast deployment were top requirements, making Heroku a perfect choice.  They added support for my favorite language last fall and their step-by-step Python setup guide only takes a few minutes to complete.  With that complete, deploying Sonya’s birthday app was as simple as a git push – all that remained was to kick out some code.

Flexing with Flask

Flask’s simplicity meant I could keep the entire app in a single python file, which I opened as app.py.  First step, write a little boiler plate to define the Flask app:

Next, I define a list of reasons the birthday app recipient is awesome (dutifully collected by my partner-in-crime Alex).

Bookmark this post:

Just when you thought Siri, the voice-enabled virtual assistant on Apple’s newest iPhone, couldn’t get more pervasive, the application showed up on last night’s episode of “The Big Bang Theory,” a surprise hit comedy on CBS about four nerds who work in the physics department at an unnamed California University. One of the characters, Raj Koothrappali, [...]

Bookmark this post:

As I alluded to in an earlier post, NextUC is now integrating with Office 365 for Exchange and Unified Messaging.  This is a new feature that just went live today though I have been using if for a couple of weeks and its been working great. I really believe in the concept of hosting Lync and what it can do to empower small to medium size companies. Its more cost effective than an on premise Lync installation and you don’t need a huge support staff to administer Lync and support it. Head on over for a free trial.

Bookmark this post:

By Sean White, Pronexus Telecom Support Engineer

When planning and ultimately deploying an IVR solution you will need to decide how the IVR will connect to the telephony infrastructure.  This means that you must decide  what  protocol to use and what hardware is needed for the server to support that protocol.  Often, customer sites may have stipulations on how your IVR can connect to the existing telephony infrastructure, since the IVR will be on their site after all.  Then there are the times when you get to decide.

So, where to begin?  Considerations are seemingly endless; protocol support, hardware requirements for the interface, server requirements, channel density and performance, life expectancy of the interface, cost, ease of integration, application performance on a given protocol.… just to name a few.

An IVR built with VBVoice can work with T1/E1 ISDN or CAS, analog, and VoIP through integration with Dialogic media.  In the case of T1/E1 and analog, a PCI or PCI-express board is installed on the server, and specific drivers are installed.  Some configuration on the board and on VBVoice is required, but the integration is relatively straightforward.  In the case of using media boards from the Dialogic JCT and DM3 family, all resources are hardware-based.  This means the DSP (to perform all voice processing like detecting DTMF, conferencing, fax, echo cancelling) is on the board and there are limited ways to configure resources.  Adding more resources might require adding new cards to the server.. Depending on what the production system will do, you must evaluate the different boards that are available to get the one you need in order to get the required density and allow for eventual expansion in the future .  When you consider that these boards are full length PCI format (12.5 inches long and 3.5 inches tall) it can become a problem to find a server chassis to accommodate the boards. In a scenario where the IVR must reside at the customer site, the footprint of the server can become a potential issue when having to ‘fit in’ to the existing server-room layout.

We are seeing an increase in the number of VoIP IVR deployments.  Given the versatility, lower cost, and excellent performance characteristics of VoIP, as such I will focus more on this protocol integration.

Dialogic Host Media Processing (named now DialogicPowerMedia HMP) performs media processing without requiring the use of specialized hardware, using the server’s CPU instead.

HMP, as it is more commonly referred to, is able to do call control and media processing for TDM cards like  Dialogic’s lineup of DNI boards for E1/T1 or could be used for a full VoIP solution. For VoIP it handles both the SIP/H.323  call stack and media processing.  Also, it is possible to run a T1/E1 solution with VoIP capabilities by using a DNI board; which offers capabilities for  creating media gateways with complex scenarios, interfacing TDM and VoIP with powerful media processing.

HMP works like this: all call processing is handled by the local CPU.  The physical VoIP connection is the primary NIC card of the server. What determines the number of VoIP channels available is in the HMP licensing.  For each VoIP channel (SIP or H323) there must be 1 RTP, 1 IP Call Control, and 1 Voice resource, which is achieved by purchasing the corresponding HMP license.  If you must handle fax capabilities, then you will need to add to this a fax license.  If you need Conference, then you will need to add a Conference license for each Conference member that there will be. The licenses determine the resources or capabilities of the VoIP call stack.

Since there is no PCI or PCI-express board required in a VoIP scenario, the server chassis doesn’t need to be large in order to physically fit the board.  A 1U chassis could be used to run the IVR, for example.  With the latest version of VBVoice and Dialogic HMP, it is now possible to deploy the IVR solution on a Virtual Machine, greatly increasing the versatility of the solution.  System performance is very stable.  Modern server specs allow the IVR to handle 200 concurrent channels where an efficient application is using pre-recorded prompts, DTMF handling and database queries.  This number decreases with the addition of Text To Speech and Speech Recognition of course.

One of the great aspects of the HMP VoIP solution is that you only purchase the resources you need and when you need, allowing an easy extension of capabilities of your application without the need for hardware changes. This offers huge cost savings when compared to a PCI or PCI-express media board solution. With the boards, as mentioned, the resources are hardware-based.  So, you may be purchasing a board which has capabilities that your IVR won’t use, such as a DMV board with fax capabilities.  If your IVR will not perform fax, then why have fax resources available?  You have paid for this ability, but won’t use it, so this is money lost.

With HMP you purchase the licenses which equate to resources.  So, you have 4 RTP, 4 IP Call Control and 4 Voice licenses for HMP.  This means your IVR can handle 4 VoIP channels.  As production rolls along, you find it necessary to increase the number of channels which the IVR can handle.  It is just a matter of purchasing additional licenses to increase capacity.  If you need 4 additional channels, you would purchase another 4 RTP, 4 IP Call Control, and 4 Voice.  The new license is combined with the existing one to create a block of 8 RTP, 8 IP Call Control, 8 Conference.  These resources are pooled, and are available to any of the application’s channels.

If your existing infrastructure will allow for a VoIP connection, or you have the option to connect the IVR to a VoIP provider directly (maybe your ISP provides a VoIP connection), then implementing an HMP VoIP solution is a great option.

Bookmark this post:

The company is in the process of fixing bugs.

Bookmark this post:

Solutions include Asterisk Speech Recognition API.

Bookmark this post:

Speech understanding added to EHR platforms and mobility solutions.

Bookmark this post:

Three—

A couple years ago, Google got busted in a federal sting operation that involved a convicted con artist, advertising for illegal online pharmacies and a $500 million settlement. Crikey, it sounds like a movie script.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, the feds used a “convicted fraudster,” in prison at the time, to pose as a businessman running illegal online pharmacies.

At the request of the feds, grifter David Whitaker set up fake businesses pretending to sell first steroids and human growth hormones and then “prescription narcotics, Prozac and Valium without prescriptions.”

Whitaker recently told the Wall Street Journal that Google’s ad executives didn’t go for it initially, but then they worked with him to try to circumvent the laws governing this type of activity. Oooooh, that’s totally Dark Side.

From the San Francisco Chronicle:

Most damning of all, Whitaker told the Journal that he made phone calls in which he walked through the illegal parts of his fake Web sites with Google execs, and once told them that one of his clients wanted to become the biggest steroid dealer in the U.S. The calls were recorded.

All this happened two years ago but is news again after Whitaker talked to the Wall Street Journal. The timing on it couldn’t be worse for Google, what with the other Dark Side things on the company’s dirty laundry list in the news right now.

People are jumping on the hypocrisy of it all considering Google’s slogan, which now just seems to be a tongue-in-cheek inside joke—either that or the company just doesn’t operate under the same guiding principles it used to. No matter what, it’s definitely Dark Side. Yoda would never do that.

But there’s still more…

Four—

Google is being roundly criticized left and right all over the newswires and tech blogosphere for changing their security policies and giving their users a take-it-or-leave-it choice.

Basically, Google users have to accept sharing of their information between many of Google’s various products (Gmail, Google+, et cetera). It’s either that or users close their accounts—they can’t choose what information they want to share.

You know who else gives take-it-or-leave-it choices? The Emperor, that’s who…

“If you will not be turned, you…will…be…destroyed.” (In that waaaay creepy voice.)

Don’t do it, Luke. The Empire might have better pay and bennies, but you’re gonna hate the work. Same to you, Google.

Bookmark this post:

Wow. It’s like Luke Skywalker listening to the Emperor make his case in Return of the Jedi and, instead of telling him to go bake a cake, he says:

“Well, when you put it that way, it does make a lot of sense. I mean, I’d get to work with my dad, which is pretty cool (except he can be kind of a jerk sometimes). Alright, why not? Dark Side it is.”

“Don’t Be Evil” is Google’s credo. Or at least it used to be. Recently, it seems like they’ve thrown that out with the trash, along with the Millennium Falcon and Boba Fett’s ship in Empire Strikes Back.

For the record, here’s four Dark Side things Google has done lately…

One—

Recently Google broke its own rules regarding paid sponsorships and had to censor itself in its own listings. I personally thought the whole thing was hilarious (I don’t have anything against Google, I just thought it was a funny situation).

Basically, a blogger that Google had hired (through subcontractors) included a direct link to Google’s website in his blog post (a no-no). We can’t really blame Google for that because it’s not entirely within their control, but it’s a mistake nonetheless. Google dinged itself for 60 days in organic search rankings for the gaff.

The funniest part to me was that they were saying things like they’d have to monitor the things that Google put up on its website and stuff like that. So like one Google dude yelling over the cube to another Google dude, “Dude, don’t put that up.”

Two—

At the end of last year, Google representatives scraped the client database of a small company running a business listing website in Kenya (to help get Kenyan businesses online and boost the poor nation’s economy), then used it to try to steal the company’s customers.

Whoa, whoa, whoa, not-yet-evil Annakin Skywalker.

The Google reps systematically (over months) scraped Mocality’s client list (manually, which is even more Darth Vader-ish), called the clients saying Google was working with Mocality (not true) and tried to sell them websites. 

Read the rest in the follow-up to this post, And the Google List Goes On…

Bookmark this post:

// This entry was originally posted on the Aberdeen Blog, available here // Aberdeen’s Service Management research has revealed how customer satisfaction plays a vital role in driving loyalty, retention and increased profitability. In Aberdeen’s State of Service Management: Forecast for 2012 research (January 2012), organizations reporting a 90%+ level of customer satisfaction revealed significantly [...]

Bookmark this post:

I saw this interesting chart today on the average price of a Super Bowl ad over time. This year’s matchup between the Giants and Patriots is fetching a whopping $4 million for a 30 second spot. That’s more than many companies spend on advertising (or anything for that matter!) in an entire year.

It got me thinking: how do you measure the impact of a Super Bowl ad? How do you track if it actually generates leads into your business? Granted for many consumer products companies it’s more about building brand awareness than an immediate call to action, but the point remains. Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com, once said: “We believe the telephone is one of the best branding devices out there. We have the customer’s undivided attention for 5-10 minutes—compare that with a 30-second Super Bowl ad when the viewers are probably not paying full attention. If we get the interaction right, what we’ve found is that customers remember that for a very long time and tell their friends and family about us.”

What do you think? Is $4 million for 30 seconds with a huge audience worth it? Or would you rather have 10 minutes of a potential customer’s undivided attention?

Bookmark this post:

This is part two of a series of blog posts that walk you through using the different .NET Helper Libraries that Twilio provides.

These libraries simplify using the Twilio REST API for .NET developers, and provide as set of utilities that make it easy to work with TwiML and Twilio Client. Read part one here. 

Adding Twilio Helper Libraries to your Project

Twilio uses NuGet, Microsoft’s open-source package management system, to publish our helper libraries.  Using NuGet allows you to add the libraries to your project without having to leave Visual Studio or WebMatrix, have NuGet automatically manage the assembly dependencies, and also notify you of updated versions.

If you are using Visual Studio 2010 and have not already done so, you can install NuGet using these instructions.

If you are using WebMatrix as your development environment, you can access the NuGet user interface using these instructions.

Adding Helper Libraries in Visual Studio 2010

Once you have NuGet installed in Visual Studio 2010, launch the package manager dialog:

When the dialog opens simply search the online catalog for ‘Twilio’.  The screenshot below shows the results returned from the NuGet catalog:

Simply click the Install button next to the Twilio package you want to add to your project and watch as NuGet downloads the Twilio library package (and its dependencies) and adds the references to your project.

Adding Helper Libraries to your WebMatrix website

If you are using Microsoft’s free web developer tool WebMatrix, it also includes integration with NuGet.  To add the Twilio helpers to a site created using WebMatrix simply open the WebMatrix administration website (as described here).  Change the Show dropdown from Installed to Online and use the search field to Search for ‘Twilio’:

Click the Install button next to the Twilio package you want to add to your project and the WebMatrix admin website will download and install the Twilio library package (and its dependencies) into the Bin directory of your website.

Now that you know how to get the Twilio helper libraries into your website or project, in the next post we’ll look at using the Twilio.API library to make requests to the Twilio REST API.

This series is written by Twilio Developer Evangelist Devin Rader. As a co-founder of the St. Louis .NET User Group, a current board member of the Central New Jersey .NET User Group and a former INETA board member, he’s an active supporter of the .NET developer community. He’s also the co-author or technical editor of numerous books on .NET including Wrox’s Professional Silverlight 4 and Wrox’s Professional ASP.NET 4. Follow Devin on Twitter @devinrader

Twilio for .NET Developers Part 2: Adding Twilio Helper Libraries to your Project

Bookmark this post:

Companies introduce Jennifer Pick by Voice in Europe.

Bookmark this post:

iPECS-MG provides business communications for mixed TDM/IP environments.

Bookmark this post:

Merge continues the expansion of its healthcare IT partner program.

Bookmark this post:

The analog way for families to keep track of soccer practice, ballet and flute lessons is a calendar tacked up on a wall in the kitchen. But, as we all know, we don’t live in an analog world anymore.

If families were like companies, they could keep track of things with iCalendar or Outlook, but that would require laptops or smartphones for everyone in the family, along with some tech savvy.

A study by Iowa State University researcher Mark Monroe proposes something much simpler—using a voice interface system to do the job.

“[Feature] cell phones have enabled communications between family members but don’t provide access to systems such as email and the family calendar,” Monroe writes in his report, Remote Voice Interface for Home Communication Tasks.

Let’s face it, what dad or mom wants to buy $600-$800 smartphones for every member of the family? A much less expensive and simpler approach could be to set up a voice interface system.

“The proposed system is a home information system focused on improving family communication and control of household tasks. A core set of communication functions includes voicemail, email and calendar.”

With the advances in recent years in voice-interface technology (particularly the advent of VoiceXML IVR and improvements in speech recognition software), such a system is possible.

“In order to make these functions as available as possible, they must be accessible in various forms, via various means.”

What Monroe proposes is a centralized system that resides in the family home but is accessible from a variety of devices. Family members could access the calendar or emails on the family home computer, via a PDA, by calling into the system for audio messages or even with a “portable screen in the kitchen.”

It’s an interesting concept—kind of like the systems used in the corporate world, just scaled down for the family.

Bookmark this post:

Join us Friday January 27th for our Tropo Drinkup in San Francisco at our SOMA headquarters office and enjoy some complimentary drinks while entertained by future rockstars letting loose on our piano and guitars.

We like to get our happy hours on early so be ready to break some New Year’s resolutions with us at 3:58pm.  Yep, 3:58pm.  Because two minutes can make the world of a difference for your weekend.

End your work week early and shimmy by the Tropo office for some beers, bites and a lil’ rock jam session if you are so inclined.

Tropo Drinkup San Francisco

When: Friday January 27th

Where: 28 2nd Street 3rd Floor San Francisco, CA 94123

Time: 3:58pm- 6:00pm

©2012 The Tropo Blog. All Rights Reserved.

Related posts:

1. Palo Alto Startup Drinkup Wednesday 1/12
2. South Beach Startup Drinkup Tonight!
3. Philadelphia Startup Drinkup

Bookmark this post:

Feeling left out because you don’t have an Apple iPhone 4S and can’t have a relationship with Siri? Don’t despair, True Knowledge this week unveiled Evi, a voice assistant app for Apple OS and Android phones. Evi is available on Android’s app store for 99 cents and she can also be downloaded from  iTunes. According [...]

Bookmark this post:

My friend Russ Fustino did some video recording at the JaxDug 2011 Code Camp last August and just posted the second part of the video which has the GotSpeechGuy included. You can read more about it at Russell’s Blog.

Jacksonville Code Camp

That’s Joe Healy in the orange shirt and he is probably the greatest Microsoft Developer Evangelist that ever lived. Joe has really grown the Florida developer community and is the main reason we have 5 or 6 code camps every year as well as several SQL Saturdays. Thanks Joe.

The Orlando .NET Code Camp is scheduled for march 31st and I have submitted a session ( Administering Lync Server 2010 using PowerShell) for that. I’ve spoken at the Orlando event several times and they always put on a great event. If you are in or going to be anywhere near to Orlando at the end of March you should add it to your calendar. I’ll provide more details later.

Bookmark this post:

I started working in the IVR industry in 1995. At that time, it was a little embarrassing to tell people what I did for a living. They really didn’t understand what Interactive Voice Response meant, and I would invariably have to explain, “You know, ‘Press 1 for Checking; Press 2 for Savings.’” And then I always got that look, quite often followed by, “Oh, you make those things—that nobody likes.”

It has been over 15 years since those days, and I am proud to say that I get that response a lot less often. And, I am proud to say I STILL work in the IVR industry. The technology and its acceptance have come a long way, perhaps in part as a result of better and smarter technology.

Years ago, I saw an episode of Seinfeld in which Kramer somehow managed to have the “movie phone number” pointed to his phone. He was answering calls and trying to inform people what movies were playing, at what time, and at which theater. When he realized he could not identify the touch tones, he decided to ask the caller, “Why don’t you just tell me the name of the movie you’d like to see?” While making for a funny scene, when I think back on that episode, it reminds me of a couple things. First, the ability to call an IVR system in order to find out what movies are playing, as well as the time and location, is pretty cool! AND, with IVRs today, we really can have the caller simply tell the system what movie they would like to see!

In addition to new and different applications, the technology that can be used in conjunction with an IVR system makes the use of these systems more and more popular every day—technology such as speech recognition, voice biometrics, integration with social media, mobile applications, GPS applications, and the list goes on and on!

Callers are not the only ones warming up to IVRs—more and more businesses are utilizing IVR technology and finding more creative uses for it. Entire industries that would not have dared to dream of having their beloved clients talk to a machine are now more apt to at least give callers the option of getting what they want or need from an IVR. Of course, they still want to offer the ability to speak to a live person. And that is just fine! There are certainly instances in which it makes perfect sense to talk to a person.

Even better, not only are businesses more at ease with allowing their clients to use an IVR, but many are also more comfortable with newer technology and ways to deploy the systems. No longer do businesses need to invest tens, even hundreds, of thousands of dollars in on-premise IVR equipment. Nor do they need to pay exorbitant fees and wait months or years to have an application up and running. Now through cloud technology and advanced development tools, they can have an application set to go live in a matter of days and can simply pay as they go to flatten their costs.

I love the fact that IVRs have become more advanced, more interactive, and especially more accepted, but how do you feel about them? Do you still prefer waiting on hold to talk to a person or is interacting with an IVR to get the information you want with a few voice commands (or touch tones—for you old schoolers) becoming your first line of attack? Let us know in the comments below!

Bookmark this post:

 It’s an ongoing effort here to drive down prices for developers, such as previous price decreases with Twilio Voice, Twilio phone numbers and Twilio SMS. Today we’re introducing even more value with volume sms pricing for US and Canadian users.

We understand how important competitive pricing is for you and your business as you grow, and we’re committed to adding value to your experience.

What Does Volume Pricing Mean

As your user base grows and SMS messages increase, we will automatically apply volume pricing to your account. It’s already enabled on your account so when your volume crosses the threshold the messages will just cost less. No sign up needed, no shenanigans. See the full details on our updated volume pricing page.

Volume pricing for SMS is the companion to our current volume pricing for Voice, where your account is also automatically updated once reaching a high threshold of minutes.

When you invest in Twilio, we invest in you. As we grow internationally we focus on aggressive pricing so you build a global and sustainable business. We look forward to watching your products and services grow.

New Volume Pricing for Volume SMS

Bookmark this post:

For reasons I can’t fully explain, my favorite bicycle is the simplest one I own. (I live in Colorado, bike all the time, have several bikes, yada yada.) My favorite bike isn’t my mountain bike with 24 gears, hydraulic disc brakes and oil-dampened suspension in the front and back—it’s my old-school steel, single-speed road bike.

I’m not exactly sure why it is, but that simple bike is the one I keep coming back to more than any other. It’s way more than the sum of its parts, which are dated as far as bike technology goes.

The bike just feels pure to me—a perfect expression of The Bicycle. And when I look at it, I understand it. I know how all the parts work. I can take them apart and see. They’re not a mystery to me like the brakes or suspension on my mountain bike.

In his article, CNN film critic A.S. Hamrah explains the attraction of The Artist to us in the same way. The movie is tangible, it makes sense to us. Like my single-speed to me. But Hamrah also brings up another point I think is vital here.

“More and more, we put ourselves in the strange position of using technology to get away from technology,” he writes. “When we travel, smartphones connect us with places to find quiet and solitude…”

He’s right. And, more than that, technology is reminding us of our nature by way of contrast. I don’t think it’s taking us away from ourselves, at least not the way technophobes say.

It’s the yin and the yang. Without rain, we can’t see the true nature of sun. Without my mountain bike, I can’t see the purity of my single speed. Without Avatar, we can’t see The Artist.

Bookmark this post:

Services integrate collaboration tools.

Bookmark this post:

CNN special contributor A.S. Hamrah, a film critic from Brooklyn, thinks we’re attracted to the film The Artist because of our desires for more things tangible in a digital age.

I think he’s probably right, but I don’t see technology as counter to our nature. As Hamrah even suggests, technology may provide use with both the cause and the cure.

The Artist is a silent black-and-white about the transition from silent to talking films—talkies. It comes at a time when we’re transitioning from projection films to digital and 3-D, and it’s evidently scratching and itch because it’s up for 10 Oscars.

“As digital imagery takes over the movies, filmmakers and audiences seek to reconnect to an analog, hands-on world,” Hamrah writes. “One in which machines are understandable and fixable.”

He has an excellent point. For all our emphasis on the mind and thought, humans tend to forget we’re animals as well. The mind can’t make the body forget about itself—not a body whose main purpose is to exist and thrive in a very physical, tangible way.

The mind’s wanderings are secondary to our body’s need to go on, and our instincts take over whenever there’s doubt about survival, overriding the mind quite easily and surprisingly (just ask people who’ve endured extreme hardships and done things they never thought themselves possible of to survive).

And the thing is, our natural selves need tangible, need to touch and feel. While our minds are understandably bewildered and awed by the magic we call technology, our natural selves don’t really care.

But to say that technology is ruining us or taking us away from our true nature is to simplify the point. While this is certainly happening to some degree, we’re also quite aware that it’s happening. And we’re not idly standing by while it does.

Stay tuned for the second part of this post…The Artist vs. Avatar

Bookmark this post:

DrupalCon 2012 is coming soon, where a worldwide community will descend upon Denver to discuss publishing, theming, best practices, modules and all-things Drupal.

This only happens two times a year, so in celebration of the module-fueled event we’re paring up with the Drupal Association for this extended developer contest.

The Challenge: Twilio + Drupal = Epic Module

Create a Drupal module with Twilio integration for this 2012 DrupalCon. Submissions will be judged by some of the leading minds in the Drupal world during the main event on March 21st, with the top three modules given the opportunity to present on stage. Judges include the lead developer of VoIP Drupal Leo Burd, and Co-Founder of San Francisco based Drupal shop Chapter Three Matt Cheney. Twilio team members will also be on site on March 19th to help you with any questions or last minute hacking.

In addition to the glory and admiration of your peers, you can win some great prizes:

• Third place: Unique Twilio VIP swag
• Second place: Kindle Fire and Twilio T-shirt
• First place: Macbook Air and Twilio track jacket

Not attending DrupalCon this year? Don’t worry, you can still enter with the chance to win a sweet prize and Drupal glory. The non-attendee winner will receive a Kindle Fire.

Twilio and Drupal Inspiration

To get you rolling, here are some thoughts:

• User interface is more than pixels – Web Accessibility, Section 508
• Verbal/aural or visual – which is more important?
• How do you manage Drupal when not at a computer?
• Have you wished Drupal could reach out to your visitors?

Contest Rules

• Entries must be submitted here by 11:59 PM MDT on Monday March 19th (Monday 10:59 PM PDT/5:59AM GMT on Tuesday, March 20th)
• Submission form can also be found on the DrupalCon Website
• Entries must use the Twilio API and Drupal
• Entry cannot be an app that has previously won a Twilio Developer Contest
• Bonus points for submission to the Twilio App Gallery and Programmable Web

How To Get Involved

If you need any help or want to bounce some ideas off of other Twilio coders, join us on our forums or just drop a note to help@twilio.com. Submissions for the Drupal Twilio contest are accepted here.

What’s Are Developer Contests About?

Every two weeks, we encourage developers to build something awesome with a Twilio-powered contest.  As a language agnostic platform for cloud communications, we want developers of every shape, size and stripe to solve problems and grab a little glory using Twilio. To kickstart the creative process, we’ve run these developer contests for over a year.

Developer Contest: Drupal and Twilio Join Forces for DrupalCon

Bookmark this post:

Some made New Year’s resolutions to lose weight, cut down on alcohol consumption, to eat healthier, or to quit smoking.  They are called resolutions because they are often times huge undertakings that demand mental and physical dedication.  Often times correcting a behavior is not fun and takes a huge amount of concentration and effort.  But interactive voice response systems can help.

Several years ago a major pharmaceutical company commissioned an IVR system with Plum Voice that both assisted people in their efforts to quit smoking and also collected research about the habits and efforts of participating individuals.

So how exactly does this work?  The pharmaceutical company who commissioned the system has worked closely with researchers who had comprehensively studied the most effective smoking cessation techniques using a large demographic of individuals as test subjects.

They found that one of the most effective methods was allowing people to record personal messages and reminders, and then specify when they had the strongest cravings (i.e., when they got up in the morning, before lunch, prior to bedtime).  With this information, the IVR would store these customized messages and call or text people prior to the specified craving times.

Extensive research showed that these personal reminders prior to craving times are one of the most effective ways to get people to stop smoking.  There have been a slew of scientific studies postulating that one of the greatest challenges for those trying to wean themselves off nicotine is finding the mental strength to resist their cravings.

Pursuant to this, hearing their own voice instead of a prerecorded message or the voice of a TTS engine gave them both motivation and accountability, which are ultimately some of the most vital factors in reforming behavior and easing mental urges.

Not only did this IVR system help curb and suppress individual’s hankerings for cigarettes, the system also collected data when individuals did slip.  Participants could call in and provide detailed information about the circumstances and emotions fueling cravings in order to provide researchers with a comprehensive understanding of the circumstances (physical, mental, and emotional) when they did relapse.

Using this data, researchers could form a detailed understanding of how, when, and why those struggling with quitting had a cigarette, and tailor their program to these findings.  This proved to be a highly successful program with large customer success rates.  Just another unique way IVR can be used to help people and generate ideas!

Bookmark this post:

While the world is enraptured with Apple’s voice assistant Siri, the company may be readying to enter yet another arena, the smart pen market. Smart pens lets users record everything they hear, say and write, while linking audio recordings to notes. First, a bit of background about smart pens, which have been described as Montblanc‐size [...]

Bookmark this post:

I’ve now got my NextUC account linked up with Office 365 for Exchange and UM. This is awesome and I really like the way my voice mail is presented in Outlook.

I’ve been using this for about 2 weeks now with no real problems. I’m finding that NextUC when integrated with Office 365 handles all of my collaboration needs. I worked on the backend for this integration which was a great learning experience for me as I got familiar with the Lync PowerShell cmdlets needed to configure the integration. The more I mess around with Lync PowerShell the more I appreciate the effort that Microsoft has put into it. I do almost as much development in PowerShell these days as I do in C# or java.

Since I now have the Lync Mobile Client on my Windows Phone I have IM and collaboration whereever I go. I love being able to stay in contact and join conferences when I am on the go. If you haven’t downloaded a client for your mobile device (I also have it on my Ipad) then what are you waiting for?

Anyway, this feature should be coming soon for all NextUC users

Bookmark this post:

 Today we kick off a new series of blog posts that introduce and walk you through using the different .NET Helper Libraries that Twilio provides. These libraries simplify using the Twilio REST API for .NET developers, and provide as set of utilities that make it easy to work with TwiML and Twilio Client.

Introducing the Twilio API Helper Libraries

Twilio provides an easy to learn and use REST API that allows you to quickly integrate Voice and SMS communication in your application.  REST is a fantastic and simple communication protocol because it makes the Twilio available to any platform that can make HTTP calls, but on the .NET platform it does require a bit of common plumbing code.

To help .NET developers get productive with Twilio faster, and avoid having to write that plumbing code, Twilio provides a set of .NET helper libraries for .NET developers that takes care of that for them.   These helper libraries wrap various aspects of Twilio to provide simple and easy ways to interact with the Twilio REST API, Twilio Client and to generate TwiML responses.

Twilio provides five libraries for .NET developers:

* Note that all libraries require .NET 3.5, Silverlight 4 or Windows Phone 7 or later.

Getting the Libraries

The libraries are provided in binary form through the NuGet package manager extension available for Visual Studio 2010 and WebMatrix, however you can download the source code for all of these libraries, submit bugs and feature requests, or even contribute your own code to the libraries using GitHub.  The GitHub site also includes a Wiki that contains complete documentation for using the libraries.

In the next post, we’ll look at how you can get started using the different available helper libraries by adding them to your project in Visual Studio or WebMatrix.

This series is written by Twilio Developer Evangelist Devin Rader. As a co-founder of the St. Louis .NET User Group, a current board member of the Central New Jersey .NET User Group and a former INETA board member, he’s an active supporter of the .NET developer community. He’s also the co-author or technical editor of numerous books on .NET including Wrox’s Professional Silverlight 4 and Wrox’s Professional ASP.NET 4. Follow Devin on Twitter @devinrader

Twilio for .NET Developers Part 1: Introducing the Twilio Helper Libraries

Bookmark this post:

Want to maximize your advertising ROI in 2012? Register for our Webinar on February 1, 2012 at 12:00 CST.

Join Irv Shapiro, founder and CEO of Ifbyphone and two-time Inc. 500 winner, as he shares insights into how you can boost advertising ROI up to 400%, capture 30% more leads and negotiate better advertising rates using cold, hard data.

What will you learn?

• Projected US ad spending trends from 2011 – 2015
• What lead type is most valuable to most sales organizations?
• How to measure response rates with a call-to-action of “call us”
• Examples of how to demonstrate ROI, optimize ad spend & increase lead flow

This Webinar is ideal for business owners as well as marketing and advertising executives across all industries.

Sign-up now. You won’t want to miss this one.

Bookmark this post:

Voxeo is at IQPC Call Center Week in Orlando right now, and we’re excited to make the announcement of our first Voxeo Connect Certified Partner Application: MicroMessenger, the interactive campaign management and outbound notification application from MicroAutomation. MicroMessenger’s certification as a Voxeo partner application represents the next step in the strategic partnership between Voxeo and MicroAutomation, which began in 2011 with MicroAutomation’s certification as a preferred Professional Services partner within the Voxeo Connect partner program.

MicroMessenger provides a standards-based, fully hosted solution for proactive, event-based customer care, with complete, turnkey campaign management for interactive, outbound service and notifications. The platform is extremely flexible, so whether you’re working on ad-hoc projects such as sending seasonal notifications, or powering core business processes like verifications and appointment scheduling, you’ll be able to develop campaigns easily, and quickly show a return on your investment due to MicroMessenger’s low-cost startup and on-demand access. And with MicroMessenger’s hosting on the Voxeo Prophecy cloud, you have a 100% uptime guarantee on a reliable IVR platform with no large upfront investment in on-premise equipment.

Sample applications include:

• Payment reminders
• Shipping notifications
• Targeted product offers
• Service changes/outages/interruptions
• Employee alerts
• Appointment reminders/confirmations/rescheduling
• Emergency alerts
• Personalized information delivery
• Seasonal campaigns

Looking for more info on best practices in outbound customer service and proactive customer engagement? Check out the Voxeo/MicroAutomation whitepaper on the business case for Outbound IVR, then learn more about Voxeo Outbound IVR /SMS and MicroAutomation MicroMessenger.

©2012 Voxeo Talks. All Rights Reserved.

Related posts:

1. Join Voxeo at Enterprise Connect to Learn About SIP, Open Source
2. Voxeo and TradeHarbor partner to provide voice biometrics and fight identity theft
3. Voxeo announces a new beta service… Prophecy Log Search – a better way to search your application log files!

Bookmark this post:

Tropo loves startups. Why? Because entrepreneurs always think of new and innovative ways to use Tropo that we’ve never even dreamed. Since we launched Tropo in 2009, we’ve helped thousands of developers and entrepreneurs build apps, demo them, pitch them, get investment and launch into full businesses. In fact, pretty much everyone behind Tropo from the engineers to evangelists…even our newest community manager…have come from startups of our own. It’s part of our DNA.

That’s why we’re extremely pleased to announce that Tropo is partnering with Newspepper, TheNextWeb, i/o Ventures, Startup Bus, Startup America (and a whole lot more!) to launch Startup World!

Startup World is a global competition to find the next big thing. The competition will be held in 36 cities world-wide, with the regional winners flying to Silicon Valley for a grand showdown to battle it out in front of a panel of expert judges to be crowned the “world’s best startup”.

We’ll be kicking off Startup World at a Launch Party at i/o Ventures in San Francisco on Tuesday Jan 24th 2012.   Come join us for the fun and some awesome speakers including Sarah Lacy!

©2012 The Tropo Blog. All Rights Reserved.

Related posts:

1. Tropo joins Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, NASA & The World Bank for Random Hacks of Kindness
2. Tropo Sponsors Startup Weekend Phoenix!
3. Pitching to Win at Philly Startup Weekend

Bookmark this post:

Next-generation mobile collaboration based on Avaya Aura architecture.

Bookmark this post:

Name reflects newly unified technologies.

Bookmark this post:

“Social media is just how people interact now.”

It’s a fairly obvious statement, but where it came from is interesting—Taulbee Jackson, head of the marketing firm that will be running the “social media command center” for Super Bowl XLVI.

What?

Yes.

The host committee for this year’s Super Bowl two weeks from now in Indianapolis has acquired 2,800 square feet downtown and hired a digital marketing agency to provide across-the-board social media support for the event, according to CNN.

“We felt it was critical to have some horsepower behind that aspect of the Super Bowl here,” Jackson told CNN. “Versus what you might have seen from other Super Bowls.”

Evidently Super Bowls are competing now too. But the idea is inventive, and the first time it’s been done. (Actually, it seems really obvious now that they mention it, like someone should have thought of it sooner than now. But that’s how the best ideas are.)

In a nutshell, the social media command center will monitor traffic on Twitter, Facebook and other sites to make the Super Bowl more user-friendly for the lucky few thousand people who will attend.

A team of over 20 people will operate the command center 15 hours a day, helping the 150,000 people coming downtown that weekend with logistics such as parking, according to CNN.

It’s kinda cool, actually. The team will be using “advanced search tools and analytics” to monitor Twitter and Facebook. If a fan tweets how bad the parking is, one of the team members can theoretically tweet back to them, telling them where to park.

It seems we’re breaking new ground here. And some see this as the first of the event-targeted social media “war room” efforts—a precedent.

Bookmark this post:

Have you heard about Phono, our open source Javascript Phone API project?

Phono is a free HTML5 jQuery-based web phone that you can add to any web page to place or receive open SIP-based VoIP calls to/from any web browser (or iOS/Android mobile device using Phono Mobile)!

Phono can be connected to Tropo to place or receive phone calls to/from real telephone numbers! Phono can also interact with Tropo voice applications directly from a web page using Tropo’s speech recognition and text-to-speech in 24 languages as well as record and play media such as WAV or MP3 files or conduct conference calls, call transfers, call recording, etc.

To make things even better, Phono and Tropo both support SIP headers which are basically key/value pairs of data that you can sent along with calls. SIP headers are very common in call center applications and enterprise screen-pop implementations. Using SIP headers allows Phono to place a call into a Tropo application and pass along data instructing Tropo to transfer the call to another telephone number. This is how all of the click-to-call demo applications work on phono.com. These demo applications are also limited to 10 minutes in length so that you can experience the quality of a Phono call and write your own Tropo application for longer calls.

Because we have had a few questions lately on this topic, I wanted to provide some sample code for both Phono and Tropo to make this easier for you to apply to your application. This demo application allows you to enter a phone number on a web page and call it using Phono and Tropo. The web page has a simple form that asks for a phone number and has a call button that initiates a SIP VoIP call to Tropo app:9996182316. Reviewing the Phono code below, you will find that it uses jQuery to pass the phone number value in the textbox to Tropo as a SIP header.

<html>
  <head>
    <script src="http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.4.2.min.js"></script>
    <script src="http://s.phono.com/releases/0.3/jquery.phono.js"></script>
  </head>
  <body>
	<input id="phonenumber" type="text">
    <input id="call" type="button" disabled="true" value="Loading..." />
    <span id="status"></span>
    <script>
    $(document).ready(function(){
      var phono = $.phono({
        apiKey: "your secret key",
        onReady: function() {
          $("#call").attr("disabled", false).val("Call");
        }
      });

      $("#call").click(function() {
        $("#call").attr("disabled", true).val("Busy");
        phono.phone.dial("app:9996182316", {
		  	headers: [
			             {
			               name:"x-numbertodial",
			               value:$('#phonenumber').val()
			             }
			           ],
          onRing: function() {
            $("#status").html("Ringing");
          },
          onAnswer: function() {
            $("#status").html("Answered");
          },
          onHangup: function() {
            $("#call").attr("disabled", false).val("Call");
            $("#status").html("Hungup");
          }
        });
      });
    })
    </script>
  </body>
</html>

You could write a Tropo transfer application using the Scripting API in one line of Ruby code that transfers the call to the phone number in the SIP header like this:

transfer $currentCall.getHeader("x-numbertodial")

What if you wanted to add a timer that ends the call after 10 minutes like we do on phono.com for demo purposes? This feature is also simple but it requires multithreading your Ruby application and using our REST API for sending a signal to interrupt the transfer method once your timer reaches its alarm.

require "net/http"

# Create second thread for timer and announcements
Thread.new do
  sleep 600 # Note: Sleep is in seconds so 600 = 10 minutes

  http = Net::HTTP.new "api.tropo.com"

  request = Net::HTTP::Get.new "/1.0/sessions/#{$currentCall.sessionId}/signals?action=signal&value=limitreached"
  response = http.request request
end

say "hold please while we transfer your call."
transfer $currentCall.getHeader("x-numbertodial"), :allowsignals => "limitreached"
say "your limit has been reached."

That’s cool but what if you wanted to block certain phone numbers or limit the demo calls to North America? You could add area codes or phone numbers to a regex array and check the desired phone number against the list of regexes to see if you should allow the call to transfer or not like this example:

phone = $currentCall.getHeader "x-numbertodial"

# Blocked North American area codes
blocked = [
  /^\+?1?8[024]9/,
  /^\+?1?26[48]/,
  /^\+?1?24[26]/,
  /^\+?1?34[05]/,
  /^\+?1?[62]84/,
  /^\+?1?67[10]/,
  /^\+?1?78[47]/,
  /^\+?1?8[024]9/,
  /^\+?1?86[89]/,
  /^\+?1?441/,
  /^\+?1?473/,
  /^\+?1?664/,
  /^\+?1?649/,
  /^\+?1?721/,
  /^\+?1?758/,
  /^\+?1?767/,
  /^\+?1?876/,
  /^\+?1?939/
]

block_call = blocked.any? { |x| phone =~ x }

You could add this code immediately above your transfer and add a conditional statement that says something like this example:

if block_call
  say "calls to this area code are blocked."
else
  say "hold please while we transfer your call."
  transfer phone, :allowsignals => "limitreached"
  say "your limit has been reached."
end

You could also add billing functionality to the Tropo script by applying a rate based on country code and multiply it times the number of seconds that the call was in progress. To accomplish this goal, you would add a timestamp at the beginning of the script and a timestamp directly following the transfer method. When either party hangs up, the Tropo script will continue running with the line immediately following the blocked method such as transfer in this case.

If necessary, you could also check to see if the Phono caller is still on the call by interrogating the $currentCall.isActive property or by wrapping your entire application in a while loop like this example:

while $currentCall.isActive
  # Do Stuff
end

I think that should get you started! You can now build your next-generation click-to-call application using Phono and Tropo! Please let us know how you are using Phono with your Tropo applications :)

©2012 The Tropo Blog. All Rights Reserved.

Related posts:

1. 2 Lines of Code To Enable Calling 1 Phone Number And Ringing Multiple Phone Numbers (like Google Voice)
2. How to Build a VoIP-Based Baby Monitor
3. Dial Multiple Phone and SIP Numbers & First to Answer Wins

Bookmark this post:

Campus2careers is a career service that focuses on matching motivated students and new graduates with companies looking for DOers, and we’ll be joining them at their next  event on Tuesday, January 31st in Austin, TX looking for interns.

With over 800 students expected to attend, we’re looking forward to chatting with Austin’s best and brightest, especially since we already have a herd of Longhorns in our midst. Come join us at the Twilio booth during the Spring Internship Fair and chat with our Austin-based Developer Evangelist Keith Casey.

Hook ‘em Horns: Twilio Longhorn Alums Report Back!

These University of Texas Alumni have fond memories of Austin, which is why it’s an honor we have the opportunity to recruit there. Below are their thoughts on being a Longhorn Alum at Twilio:

Twilio Headed to Austin in Search of Top Interns with Campus2Careers

Bookmark this post:

Alas, sometimes technology lets us down. Or the interaction of human and technology lets us down. Either way, sometimes it’s a real drag.

(Yes, I’m actually complaining about technology now, which is a surprise considering this is a primarily tech blog for an IVR company and I’m usually raving about how much technology adds to our lives.)

I thought I was so smart. (You know it’s a cautionary tale when it starts out like that.) I’d never have to watch commercials during a football game ever again, except during the Super Bowl.

All season long, I’ve been DVR-ing the games I want to watch and watching them commercial-free. I’ve actually been watching them mostly kickoff-free too because there’s no point in watching the kickoffs anymore (since they moved the ball up and all the kicks go sailing deep into the end zone or out the back, or even through the uprights).

It’s been great. I can watch a game in a half hour if I really want to. (I actually did that with some of the Broncos games, fast-forwarding to the fourth quarter where all the action happened.)

With this system, full games are a little over an hour (I skipped the halftimes too) instead of three-plus hours, which is ridiculous unless you have absolutely nothing else going on Sundays (I mean nothing).

All season long it worked for me. But then it didn’t—it finally failed me during the NFC Championship. I recorded the game with an extra half hour to account for a long-running game or overtime. Well, it wasn’t enough.

As you know, the networks schedule the games for a certain length, and they always run over. Kind of like the airlines overbooking flights. It get it, but I still think it’s weird.

Well, my NFC Championship (recorded with an extra half hour) cut off with about a minute left in regulation. I didn’t even make it to overtime. Bummer.

Bookmark this post:

The popular online dating service gives subscribers virtual phone numbers they can use to call and text potential dates.

Online dating is a competitive market. The turnover rate is inevitably high, because actually giving customers the thing that you’re selling (a meaningful connection to another person) reduces the likelihood that your happiest customers come back. So the main challenge becomes delivering an amazing experience to the user in a relatively short time.

This challenge led match.com to look for new ways to help online daters communicate anonymously. The company found Twilio. Before Twilio, Match’s team had built telecom applications by working with a third-party vendor. After discovering Twilio, match.com found that integrating voice or text messaging features can be as easy as building a basic web application.

Twilio’s platform enables three functions for the popular dating site:

●   It enables potential dates to talk over the phone without giving out their numbers.
●   It allows members to text message each other anonymously.
●   It also allows members to listen to voicemails online.

matchPhone: Anonymous calling and texting, powered by Twilio

Match.com’s Twilio-powered voice and text messaging service – called matchPhone – gives subscribers virtual phone numbers that they can safely give out to their prospective dates. These special phone numbers take every incoming call and text message and forward them to the member’s actual phone. Users have complete control over who can and cannot reach them. With a single click, a member can block someone from calling or texting again. The technology enables online daters to have intimate phone and text message conversations while retaining their privacy.

Previously match.com worked with a third party telephony provider. This provider didn’t offer support for text messaging. Any changes had to be prioritized by the vendor. This meant lead time and dependency that delayed innovation.

With Twilio’s cloud communications platform, match.com has more flexibility to enhance the product and add more features quickly. Thanks to Twilio, the company now has more control over matchPhone’s success. And match.com members have more ways to communicate with their potential dates.

It’s win-win for everyone.

Match.com Lets Online Daters Call or Text Message Without Revealing Their Phone Numbers

Bookmark this post:

WATCH NOW The Changing Voice of Customer Service Co-Presented with Best Western International and Aberdeen Group Recording Date: January 18, 2012 at 9:00 AM PST | 12:00 PM EST | 5:00 PM UK Time While newer support channels such as social media and chat dominate the headlines, voice-based interactions in the contact center still dominate [...]

Bookmark this post:

Digital note-taking tool for the iPad creates typed, freehand, or dictated notes.

Bookmark this post:

Photo by Tess Rinearson

PennApps, the bi-annual tradition for engineering’s best and brightest students across the Eastern Seaboard, came to a close Sunday afternoon with top tier weekend hacks.

Packed tight in the University of Pennsylvania Towne Building, bleary-eyed students gathered from top universities including Rutgers, Carnegie Mellon, Brown, and NYU. They were anxious to show off the results of a 48-hour effort fueled by pizza, Powerade and a passion for development. Previous years boasted many awe-inspiring apps, and this year was no different.

This theme was “simplicity”, with hardcore hacker cred on the line, but this group aimed at setting the bar even higher, and succeeded.

From Parlor Tricks to Pushing Large Scale Protest

PennApps demos didn’t fall short on wow factor,  from grand prize and audience choice winner ScratchTable turning any surface into an input a working DJ interface using a contact microphone and stethoscope, to a real-time Harry Potter geolocation app Marauder’s Mapp.  Other hits with the crowd were enunciate.me, a Twilio Client service to help people pronounce your name correctly, as well as my personal favorite, Villustrator for rolling-your-own color schemes for vim, the discriminating developer’s text editor.

Some of the most exciting hacks from the weekend came from a challenge issued to the group before kickoff. They were encouraged to take their time and talents to fight big civic and political problems. The PennApps competitors responded with vigor, producing several hacks that aspired live long after the weekend to solve real problems.

Who Am I Supporting? injec some social responsibility into your shopping experience by exposing the political contributions of the merchants who take your business.  SEPTOPA uses SEPTA public transportation data from OpenDataPhilly to convert digital outrage over the current piracy controls bills in US Congress into serious action. Get Out The Votes loads your Facebook friends and gamifies the canvassing experience, bringing the social network gaming to person-to-person politicking.

Grassroutes Exchanges Sleep to Rail Against SOPA

Photo by Tess Rinearson

Perhaps no PennApps team slept less than Grassroutes.  Rocking a platform for people passionate about a cause to create widgets to petition their Congressional representatives, Nick, Tess and Drew‘s hackathon was only beginning with taking PennApps second place prize.

Sporting an elegant interface to create a Twilio Client widget from the browser and embed that simple, slick widget on any website, Grassroutes’ release couldn’t have been more timely landing right before this week’s online movement against SOPA and PIPA.  With one-click separating a blog’s reader from a call to Congress directly within their browsers, Grassroutes’ widget-making wizardry bundled built-in geolocation to display the appropriate representatives and height/width customization for easy plug-and-protest portability.

It didn’t take long to get noticed.  Grassroutes quickly shot to the top of Hacker News a day after release.  Several tech blogs took notice shortly thereafter.  Even Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian used a Grassroutes widget right before taking the mic at New York Tech Meetup’s rally against PIPA in front of Senator Chuck Schumer’s office in Manhattan.  Suddenly, the Grassroutes team were pushing new fixes and features, turning their hackathon weekend into a grueling launch week.

110,000 unique visitors the following day, the Grassroutes team is still at it. As of Thursday, “last night accounts for 2/5ths of my sleep for the past 6 days,” Drew Inglis tweeted about his experience. “Far beyond any of our expectations.”

The Kids Are Alright

We’re not even a week from the event and the ripples of PennApps are already being felt on a national scale.  Created and run entirely by a group of dedicated undergraduates, events like PennApps illustrate the power of an authentic combination of DIY work ethic and college student sleep deprivation.  It showcases the influence that can be achieved when web development is matched with social responsibility.

And above all, it underscores how the youth of America – when left to their own devices – can shred every estimation and expectation you hold.

Undergrad Doers Take Aim At SOPA and PIPA at PennApps

Bookmark this post:

I like the idea of replacing schoolbooks with iPads. Books are clunky and effectively outdated (although I still prefer to read a novel on paper than on a screen). Digital offers a lot more. Yeah, I like that idea.

In theory.

Yesterday, Apple announced they would start selling iPads and electronic textbooks—e-textbooks—to high schools around the country. The books include biology, chemistry, algebra, environmental science and so on.

Now it’s not that I think iPads aren’t useful in schools—they offer flexibility that paper textbooks can’t match (videos, tools and search features embedded in the learning software). It’s just…well, you know kids.

Scenario One:

A study group is “hard at work” over at Taylor’s one night, up in her room. Taylor’s mom is impressed at how quiet the kids are—they’re not usually this quiet.

They’re quiet because they’re studying very hard…on how to bypass the security features that prevent downloading videos freely from the Internet…on the iPad one of them snuck out of Old Man Johnson’s study period (Old Man Johnson is 78, still “going strong,” except his study periods are like Animal House).

Scenario Two:

Last day of school. Actually, last day of high school forever for seniors Raj and Tim. Naturally, the two boys are outside before school throwing a Frisbee around. Except it’s not a Frisbee.

See what I mean? I ask you, who would feel good about lending a 16-year-old kid their brand new iPad 2 for a few months? Any takers?

Don’t get me wrong, I really hope this whole thing works. The more technology kids use, the more versed they become. Also in this case, the fewer trees we cut down. I really do hope Apple can sell iPads to schools.

But that’s the other thing that strikes me about this venture—what school districts will be buying these $600-$800 iPads? Even at cost, they’ll be a couple hundred bucks each at least. I’m sure textbooks are a fraction of that.

Are we talking Cupertino, California schools or Dupree, South Dakota schools? Because Cupertino, one of the wealthiest school districts in the country (and also Apple’s home base, by the way), could probably pop for a couple thousand iPads. Dupree, one of the poorest (with only 300 students total)…not so much.

Anyway, hopefully it all works out. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see. I doubt iPads fly all that well anyway.

Bookmark this post:

A Twilio-powered call tracking service links your web leads with your phone leads

This week our friends at Captico announced a new integration with HubSpot, a popular marketing automation tool for attracting and converting inbound leads. The integration syncs Captico’s Call Tracking Metrics and HubSpot so that you can view phone leads and manage call conversions right from within the Hubspot interface.

Todd Fisher, director of engineering at Captico, said the team built the integration after hearing that HubSpotters were struggling to track customers who had visited their websites and blogs but then called—rather than clicked—to place an order or make an appointment.

Courtesy of Todd Fisher

With the integration, website visitors will be shown a phone number assigned by Call Tracking Metrics. When a visitor calls the number, they will appear as a lead in HubSpot.  Information gathered by Call Tracking Metrics, such as audio files of recorded phone calls, will also be available.

Fisher said that, in most cases, Hubspot will be able to track the caller’s activity across the site. However, the accuracy of this data will depend on the volume of calls. Sites with high call volumes can work with Call Tracking Metrics to invest in additional phone numbers to increase accuracy.

To set up call tracking for HubSpot, a user needs to register for an account with Call Tracking Metrics. To activate the integration, users simply click “enable sync to HubSpot” under account settings and enter their HubSpot information.“We want to make it easy to track metrics in both the online and offline world,” Fisher said.

Founded in 2009, Captico is an Internet marketing firm based in Severna Park, Maryland that focuses on the strategic use of technology. Captico chose to build Call Tracking Metrics on Twilio because it combined the flexibility they were looking for and the cost effectiveness they needed, Fisher said.

Click to learn more about integrating call tracking into your business with Twilio.

Track Web and Phone Leads with Call Tracking Metrics and HubSpot

Bookmark this post:

If it’s cyberwar, I’m not sure I like the government’s odds against Anonymous, the hacktivist group now waging a large-scale attack on the government and entertainment industry.

Immediately following a huge anti-piracy crackdown, Anonymous struck back. The Feds arrested the leaders of Megaupload, a hub for illegal media downloads, and shut down the site. Anonymous responded right away by knocking out websites of the F.B.I., the U.S. Justice Department and Universal Music.

The thing about a war with contrarian quasi-anarchists (I’m not actually sure what to call hacktivists) is that those contrarian quasi-anarchists don’t have to play by the rules. Clearly. That’s what they do—they break rules.

Granted, all Anonymous has done so far is shut down a couple of websites for a few hours, but they sent a message: they can mess with the government if the government messes with them or theirs.

Within hours of Feds indicting the Megaupload leaders Thursday, Anonymous threatened reprisals (promised, actually). Then the websites went down. The same day.

According to CNN, Anonymous claims they’re targeting 10 websites. The typical attack is denial-of-service, which is basically flooding a website with so much activity that the site can’t handle it and freezes up.

“We Anonymous are launching our largest attack ever on government and music industry sites…” tweeted the group, according to CNN. “The F.B.I. didn’t think they would get away with this, did they? They should have expected us.”

According to the Washington Post, the group has a lot more planned for “Operation Donkey Punch,” including exposing information on congressional members and further attacks on the entertainment industry, including Hollywood.  They’ve already released personal information on former Connecticut Sen. Chris Dodd, the head of the Motion Picture Association of America.

Now if I was a betting man, I’d have a hard time picking who I’d take in this one, Anonymous or the Feds. Sure, a website down here and there isn’t such a big deal, but the release of information is. I mean, look at WikiLeaks.

Bookmark this post:

The Twilio engineering team recently shared a new blog post on the importance of detailed documentation. We run into the same issues any company does building an API and here we share some tips we follow to make sure we provide effective documentation for Twilio API.

Ahoy Hoy is Twilio’s engineering blog where we gather our thoughts and lessons learned over time to share with our community. In case you haven’t made your way over yet, take a look and let us know what you think while we highlight those posts here on our main blog.

Twilio Engineering: Writing Effective Documentation

Bookmark this post:

When I was a kid, my grandpa and dad owned a publishing business called Nelson-Hall. In its heyday, Nelson-Hall was a leading publisher of social science textbooks and general readership books on subjects like locksmithing, jujitsu, and world disasters (my favorite book originally published by Nelson-Hall was entitled Darkest Hours by Jay Robert Nash).

Nelson-Hall was where I learned how to run a business; from designing book covers to operating a warehouse, from marketing new titles to processing invoices. Surprisingly, Nelson-Hall was where I learned about call tracking. My grandpa was doing call tracking to build customer relationships and track marketing in the 1970s.

Here is how it worked: all accounts more than 30 days past due were sent a letter signed by “Lee Arnold.” When a caller asked the receptionist to speak with Lee Arnold, the receptionist immediately transferred the caller (only five phone lines!) to my grandfather. “Hello,” my grandfather would say. “Lee Arnold isn’t in right now, but this is Pete Ferrara, the CEO. How can I help you?” The caller (even though he owed money) immediately felt important. After all, he was talking to the CEO. My grandpa would explain nicely to the caller what the payment terms were, explain how to remedy the past due balance, and, most of the time, get paid. The caller would be left with the memory that Nelson-Hall was a good place to do business. A relationship was formed, or strengthened.

It also worked for tracking ads: when Nelson-Hall released a new title, they did direct mail marketing to booksellers and professors. For one book, letters would be sent by “Shirley Jackson.” For another book, letters would be sent by “David Leonard.” When a prospect called to request a copy of the book or to make a purchase, the caller would ask for Shirley Jackson. The receptionist announcing the caller would say, “You have a call for Shirley Jackson.” Based on the name, my dad would know the caller was interested in Title A. When he took the call, he knew his direct mail had been received and his marketing worked. He was prepared to discuss the details of the exact book.

As you might have already guessed, the secret in this story is that Lee Arnold, Shirley Jackson, and David Leonard were fictitious. They were aliases and tracking codes. The receptionist knew which names went to my grandpa or my dad. Using this strategy, Nelson-Hall was able to build relationships and track marketing spend.

Maybe he didn’t know it as call tracking, but what my grandpa did was call tracking and ad tracking. And, (you might want to sit down for these next sentences) during this time, the Internet did not exist. There was no email. Obtaining a new phone number was expensive. Direct mail took weeks to be delivered. I got paper cuts on my tongue from licking envelopes! Even without the advantages of the Internet, email, and virtual numbers, my family still knew that tracking and measuring their efforts were important.

Today seems like light years from those stamp-licking days, but the core values are the same. Relationship building remains a corner stone of business. Tracking and measuring the effectiveness of programs is critical to success. Today we look to the Internet to supply our marketing, tracking, and relationship solutions. All the while, businesses have spent an enormous amount of effort ensuring they can measure everything on the web. As soon as somebody picks up the phone and makes a call, however, that prospect has gone off the map and we have lost all connection with them.

Businesses today have one advantage my grandpa didn’t: today’s call tracking technology is easy. It’s quick to set up, simple to use, and delivers tracking instantly, all at an affordable price point. Who knew 34 years later, I’d be writing about call tracking? I guess it goes to show you that technology might change, but business fundamentals stay the same.

To learn more about call tracking, download our Call Tracking 101 Guide. And, register to join our call tracking webinar on February 1, 2012.

By the way, my sister and I still laugh about those fake employees. Thanks for the laughs and the lesson VPF and SAF.

Bookmark this post:

New VoIP option features one-click management.

Bookmark this post:

New packing station application could help companies achieve significant additional productivity gains and increase business capacities by eliminating unnecessary process steps.

Bookmark this post:

The new voice analysis application will feature immediate detection of select words and phrases.

Bookmark this post:

Companies integrate voice input and output carrier-grade systems.

Bookmark this post:

Join us from 5:30-8:30 PM on Tuesday, February 21, 2012, for Venture Lounge at Voxeo! No speeches, no PowerPoints, just a great opportunity to network with like-minded professionals while enjoying some food, drink and music at our awesome downtown Orlando headquarters on the 10th floor of the Plaza. Venture Lounge is a FREE event, intended for attendees in the following fields:

• High-tech entrepreneurs
• Designers
• Developers
• Social media professionals
• Bloggers
• Investors
• Students

To get an idea of the Venture Lounge experience and what a great space our Town Square is for networking in a laid-back atmosphere – check out this slideshow from the 2011 Venture Lounge at Voxeo:

Ready to register? Visit the Florida Technology Journal’s website. You can also RSVP on Facebook to invite friends and see who else is attending, but be sure you submit a formal registration request through FTJ!

©2012 Voxeo Talks. All Rights Reserved.

Related posts:

1. Are you an analyst or blogger at SpeechTEK or in NYC? Please join us for dinner Tuesday, Aug 25, 2009
2. Meet Voxeo’s Customer Summit Sponsors in our Unlocked and Loaded Demo Lounge
3. Voxeo’s Growth Featured in the Orlando Business Journal

Bookmark this post:

The deputy mayor of Giglio, Mario Pellegrini, told the Guardian that he boarded the stranded ship at about 11 p.m. and worked until 5 a.m. to get passengers off.

“Although I asked for the officers I couldn’t find one,” Pellegrini said. “And I never once saw the captain.”

Pellegrini added that the only officer he saw was a ship’s doctor, and the rest of the crew, “many of whom did not speak English [for benefit of the passengers], were not professional.”

In 1912, something like this might have gone unnoticed. (Then again, maybe not considering the reports about that captain.) But not today. We have digital evidence to back the reports up. Passengers took videos. The coastguard recorded phone calls. The media published the transcripts of those phone calls.

There’s no way to hide in today’s technology-driven society. Whether it’s a good thing or bad thing (Big Brother), that’s how it is. In a weird way, it serves as a kind of moral watch guard—people can’t mess up (purposefully or accidentally) and get away with it anymore.

In any case, here’s the last conversation between Schettino and the coastguard, as reported by Italian media:

Coastguard officer: “Right. You are now going back on board. You are going to go back up the rope ladder, return to the bridge and co-ordinate operations.”

A long silence.

Coastguard officer: “You must tell me how many people there are—how many passengers, women and children—and coordinate the rescue.”

Captain Schettino starts responding that he’s “on hand.”

Coastguard officer, cutting across Schettino: “Captain, this is an order. Now I am in command. You have declared the abandoning of a ship and are going to coordinate the rescue from the bridge. There are already dead bodies.”

Captain Schettino: “How many?”

Coastguard officer: “You’re the one who should be telling me that. What do you want to do? Go home? Now, go back up and tell me what can be done: how many people there are and what they need.”

Captain Schettino: “Alright. I’m going.”

But he didn’t go, as we now know—not back to the ship anyway. Instead, he walked into Giglio.

Bookmark this post:

And the band played until the very end? To hear tell of it, the captain and crew of the Costa Concordia, which sank off the coast of Tuscany Friday, were just as bad as the captain and White Star Line official in Titanic.

Details of Friday’s accident are coming to light now, and they paint an ugly picture, unfortunately. Let’s just say the band didn’t play until the end—they were too busy scrambling off the ship. And because it’s 2012 and not 1912, the whole world knows about it.

Besides possibly having questionable morals, it seems like those folks haven’t yet heard of the Internet. There are literally dozens of videos of the accident and rescue already on YouTube. If six people weren’t dead and about another 30 missing, it might be funny.

First of all, the accident was caused by a “sail-past” maneuver performed by Captain Francesco Schettino and his officers, according to the Corriere della Sera newspaper. It was a tribute to a legendary sailor from Giglio (the island they were trying to sail close to) and a “bow” (sailing by a crew member’s home) for Costa Concordia Chief Steward Antonello Tievoli.

Okay. We could chalk that up to poor judgment, a mistake. But what happened afterwards is just wrong.

Supposedly, Captain Schettino (and possibly his officers) walked off the ship onto the rocks near the port of Giglio while passengers were still on board, then lied to the Italian coastguard about it.

According to the Guardian newspaper, the captain left the ship shortly after the evacuation started. Instead of helping, he watched from the rocks. He also had a conversation with a coastguard officer, in which he lied and said he was still on the ship. Wow.

Stay tuned for the conversation…

Bookmark this post:

It’s always troubled me when businesses with just as much or more traffic to their IVR than their website clearly put more effort into their web presence than their phone or “Voice” presence. Perhaps the “out of sight, out of mind” adage is a reason why the emphasis on voice isn’t as important. It could be that there are just not that many voice experts out there. It could also be that tools like “Google Analytics” for the phone are not prevalent, economical, easy to use, nor produce easily comprehended data.

Where would web designers and marketers be without Web analytics? They would be completely in the dark – making design decisions based on speculation and the feedback of a handful of users.

Where are voice user interface (VUI) designers without phone analytics? They’re pretty much in the same boat as their web counterparts. Sure, there are known best practices for VUI design that can be taken into consideration, but you may never really know the type of people that will be calling your application and the types of issues they’re having trying to get done what they want done. Until you can take a bunch of calls over a period of time and identify the metrics that tell you where the users are having issues, or where they’re being successful, chances are that your callers will have a poor experience.

Where does one start with phone analytics? Fortunately, there are many parallels to web analytics and should feel familiar. On Angel’s platform, where a functional node of the IVR is referred to as a Voice Page and the collection of those pages is a Voice Site, it makes things a little easier to relate.

For the uninitiated, here’s a few of the metrics I find to be the most useful and examples of how the web and phone metrics relate.

1. Measuring the customers who just give up – Exit and Hang Up Rate: 

Web: The exit rate denotes the percentage of visitors who exited a site from a specific page, rather than, say, continuing to fill out a contact form, however, some exit points may indicate that people had trouble finding what they needed.

Phone: If the section of the application the caller hung up in is not a designated section where a caller should hang up, for example after a confirmation, there’s a relatively high probability that the caller was having an issue in the particular section where they hung up.

2. Hitting the hot spots – Web Page Views and Voice Page Hits:

Web: Page Views tell us the how frequently a web page is visited, which tells marketers that the web page is a popular spot or it could also mean that you’re sending users to a place unintentionally.

Phone: Voice Page Hits tell us the sections of the IVR that are the most popular. It could also reveal issues in the application, especially if it’s a section of the application that’s not supposed to be hit often or only in error.

3. Time after time – Average Time on (Web) page and Average Time on (Voice) page:

Web: Depending on the content, the average time spent on a Web page tells us if the user is interested in what’s on the page, like if there is something to read.  It can also tell us if the page is confusing or malfunctioning if the purpose of that page is to perform a quick operation and continue on to another page.

Phone: If the purpose of the phone call is to get something done or to make a selection to get to a place to get something done, that shouldn’t take a lot of time. If the duration seems longer than it should, there’s likely an issue.

4. Getting things done – Goals and Task Analysis:

Web: In web analytics and specifically, Google Analytics, goals can be set for measuring a process, like completing a sale or a subscription process.

Phone: On the phone, especially if the purpose of the application is to automate a task that would otherwise be handled by a live agent, it’s crucial to identify those tasks and measure the completion rates.  For those tasks that were not successful, it is also important to identify where in the process callers were having the most trouble.

Here are a few more examples:

Hopefully these examples brought a few things to light when it comes to the types of metrics used for analyzing a phone application. Taking a little time to analyze IVR metrics and making the appropriate changes to IVR and continually repeating that process will delight your customers and help you retain them. It can also lead to a lot of cost savings, especially for large volume applications

Bookmark this post:

Our first developer jam session in 2012 is scheduled for Wednesday, January 25, 2012. Andreas Volmer, Sr. Product Manager will talk about “iPhone, Android, Windows7: Creating Mobile Web Apps with VoiceObjects” Creating mobile web applications with VoiceObjects has become easier again: We have integrated VoiceObjects with the JQuery mobile framework. Developers will now not only get a [...]

Bookmark this post:

We’re very happy to announce that Twilio Voice is now available in Austria, Denmark, France, Ireland, and Poland. Thank you to the beta customers who provided valuable feedback and support. This is a huge step into supporting our European customers as we continue to expand internationally, and we have also announced the launch of domestic SMS in the UK.

Starting today, Twilio customers can purchase local phone numbers in these countries for just $1 USD a month with inbound calls at $.01 cent USD per minute. For more details on calling rates visit our international pricing page.

Get Started with Twilio Voice

Sign up now and start with $30 of Twilio Credit. We’ve got plenty of resources to help you get started, check these out and let us know if we can do anything else to make your experience a great one at help@twilio.com or on Twitter @Twilio

• Twilio Quickstart Guide
• How to Handle Incoming Calls
• How to Make and Outgoing Call
• How to Make Calls in Browser with Twilio Client
• Code Sample: Build an IVR

As we grow our services around the globe, your products and services will also grow in international markets. Stay tuned as we continue to add new European countries over the coming months. Looking forward to see what you build!

Twilio Launches Voice-Enabled Phone Numbers in Five European Countries

Bookmark this post: